New York Times, Friday, September 4, 2015

This puzzle turned out somewhat smooth, IMO, given the constraints of making a 72-word themeless into a triple pangram.

Clues I was glad to see stay:

• "Shop class cutter" for BANDSAW, along with "Class cutter, say" for SLACKER to kick things off
• "Float like a butterfly" for HOVER
• "All shook up" for RATTLED

Clues I was sad to see go:

• "Not going anywhere" for FROZEN
• "Has nothing in common" for UNLIKE
• A set of "Boobs" for SCHMOS & OAFS
• "Festivous" for JOVIAL (because it makes folks think of Seinfeld — oh, Frank!)

Nice additions to the mix:

• "Country Rockers?" for QUAKES
• "Stock Exchange?" for LOWS
• "Results of phoning it in?" for FAXES

Not-so-nice subtractions from the mix:

• "Ground-breaking events" for QUAKES
• "Weather conditions" for LOWS
• "Paper transactions" for FAXES

In the clues that I developed for the latter three, I felt neither one of them needed a question mark, as they would have taken away from the trickery, since the question mark may instantly indicate to solvers that there IS obvious trickery going on.

Anyway ... till next time, Word Nerds!

I normally don't care for records in crosswords, as they're too often something that constructors prize but solvers completely miss — except for the gluey globs of fill that these record-breakers often force. Sometimes I even wonder if it's a bad thing that we keep records of such things as average Scrabble score, as it might promote this type of "do it for the record's sake" type of behavior, which too often does disservice to the solver.

But today's is a record-breaking type that gave me huge enjoyment. David gets high on the leader board, giving us so many of the "Big Four," J Q X Z. All of these letters can be rough to integrate into a puzzle without causing compromises in smoothness, so it's amazing that David worked in three of each with only minor blights.

Not only that, but there are three of EVERY letter in the puzzle — a triple pangram!

Sure, I didn't love TESTEES (although it's technically a word). There are a few other entries that might raise an eyebrow, but I decided I liked them all:

QUIFF. Never heard of this before, but it's an easily recognizable hairstyle that was "in" back a few decades ago. Cool word!

QUIRE. Not in my knowledge base, but it's legit.

The SHARIF / QUIFF crossing. Okay, this one caused me fits, as I assumed SHARIF would be clued to the great Omar SHARIF, who recently passed. Serves me right for overthinking things, that maybe SHARIA and QUIFA might be better than SHARIF and QUIFF. Tough crossing, and I can see the argument for it being unfair, given the cluing.

There's not a lot of multi-word goodness, with just JUST A BIT, MASON JAR, LEGO SET, and MAE WEST standing out, but there's so much Scrabbliness that it won me over. Plus, SLACKER and BANDSAW are pretty nice one-word entries.

All in all, a memorable puzzle. I usually cringe a bit when I sniff a constructor trying to break a record, but this final product was smooth enough that I really enjoyed the stunt.